- Following last Wednesday's worrying Ukraine update, more rather concerning analysis from Scott at Foreign Notes:
"in a country where there is no rule of law, and Kushnaryov’s statement that they would install Yanukovych as PM no matter what the president did is just more evidence of this, it matters who controls the buildings. If you control the right buildings you control the bureaucracy, the documents and the stamps. That is the key to power here... To get anything done you have to have them and that often means paying a “fee” to get them. So the coffers begin to fill up again as your cronies are entrenched in centers of power. Just like it used to be. Power means more money and more money means more power...Meanwhile, Orange Ukraine notes despairingly that
"And no court order and no presidential order, nothing short of a revolution, will dislodge these people from their positions of power, that is, from the buildings... That is what it took last time, but the people have no stomach for it again, I’m afraid...So I don’t know which is worse, new elections or letting the goons back in the door. Between two bad ideas, which one?"
"Even assuming there were a chance of bringing back the Orange coalition, neither new elections nor protests will help."All is very far from well in Ukraine - yet the English language press seems utterly unconcerned at this crisis on the EU's borders.
2 Comments:
Not exactly an accurate comparison - where Ukraine has warranted barely a one line "news in brief", Lebanon has dominated the news for the last week. Plus, it is precisely the destruction and human cost in Lebanon that is getting all the attention - for the way it's being reported in the English language press, Israel has had little more than a few minor rocket attacks to put up with for the last few days. (Yes, a lot more people have been killed in Lebanon and a lot more property destroyed, but Israel has hardly come off without a scratch.)
Note to those who care: that will almost certainly be my final comment on the current Israel/Lebanon crisis, as the entire situation is mental and neither side is admirable in this. Plus, a friend of mine has been hiding in a bomb shelter in northern Israel for the last week with Hezbollah rockets raining down all around her, so I'm hardly able to take a dispassionate view of the situation (not that anyone ever seems to take a dispassionate view when it comes to Israel, but that's another matter entirely).
I think Europe is relieved. The faster Ukraine goes down the tubes, the less the EU needs to worry about the possibility of taking it on as a poential member, thus angering Russia and risking getting its gas supplies turned off.
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